TETON SPORTS ENJOYS MONUMENTAL SUCCESS WITH THE HELP OF FISHBOWL’S ADVANCED INVENTORY MANAGEMENT FEATURES

Just as a giant mountain doesn’t form in a single day, so, too, did TETON Sports have a small beginning. From its headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, TETON Sports started selling top-quality sleeping bags, backpacks, tents, cots, accessories, and apparel back in 2005 with a handful of employees.

"We do a lot with very little," says Brenden Pearson, TETON’s Warehouse Manager. "When I started working here we had maybe three or four employees. And now we’re up to 16 or 17. But still it’s a very tight-knit, close group."

"We’re small, but everybody works really hard," agrees Julie Bushman, TETON’s Financial/Operations Manager. "We want to do it right. We want to do it right the first time."

Business Challenges & Needs

TETON Sports has overcome a number of challenges by never losing sight of its purpose. "Our mission is to get outdoors and enjoy life," notes Scott Holmes, Vice President of TETON Sports. "I’m not in the business of selling you a backpack. I’m in the business of making sure that your backpacking experience is an incredible one… We don’t just put a product out that’ll sell a million pieces. We put a product out because we know that our experience outdoors is going to be benefited from it, and so is anybody else who buys that from us."

Although they had the right goal from the start, he and his team didn’t have the tools they needed to keep their inventory in line with their growing sales. "For about two years, I managed TETON by myself with a bunch of spreadsheets," says Holmes. Then I realized that I was getting in the way of my own success by trying to manage this company with a series of spreadsheets. We need to manage that inventory, and so let’s go on the search of finding an inventory management tool."

The Solution

TETON’s team went on the hunt for the ideal inventory management solution, and they knew exactly what they were looking for in one. "I was searching for an inventory system to work with QuickBooks," says Sam Bushman, TETON’s IT Director. "And after a ton of research with all the different QuickBooks partner companies, I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to pick Fishbowl.’ And that was the start of a great relationship."

The Results

The results of using Fishbowl have been phenomenal for many areas of the company’s operations. "About three years ago, I was manually entering in every single order that we got from Amazon," says Linda Bowen, TETON’s Amazon Team Lead. "And so that’s changed drastically. And thank heavens because our orders are so much larger now. We receive our orders through Vendor Central with Amazon, and we’re able to export those, and we import them right into Fishbowl."

In addition, TETON vastly improved the way it stores various items in its warehouse. This has helped with picking and other important tasks. "Pick Ticket is probably one of our favorite features," exclaims Pearson. "Previously we stacked the warehouse according to product family. So I’d put all the sleeping bags over here, all the backpacks over here. The only problem with that is that everything is – especially with sleeping bags, you have some sleeping bags that are super lightweight and, like, this big [holding his hands close together], and then we have a queen-size sleeping bag that’s, like, this big [holding his hands far apart]. And so they don’t necessarily stack very well on a pallet. We were able to restructure the whole warehouse according to size. Courtesy of locations within Fishbowl, we were able to tell the system where everything is. And so when we print an order it’ll tell us to go to location 1, location 2, 3, 4, 5, and it virtually stacks the pallet for us."

Fishbowl has proven to be just as useful on the inventory management side of the company’s business as QuickBooks has been on the accounting side. "I would say Fishbowl is to inventory as QuickBooks is to accounting," declares Sam Bushman. "Fishbowl handles the order entry, handles all the inventory, handles all the cyclical counts, handles all the inventory things you could ever want with multiple warehouses and product locations to bin numbers to First In First Out inventory to lot numbers. Any way you want to break it down, Fishbowl is capable of doing that."

TETON’s staff is completely on board with using Fishbowl in their daily operations, and they have this to say to other companies looking into Fishbowl. "If another company was wanting to use Fishbowl, I would say, ‘Do it. Do it now!’ because your business is going to grow immensely just from having that support on the back end," says Julie Bushman.

TETON expects to keep reaching new heights in the years to come. They have been saved the expense of switching to a costly ERP, thanks to Fishbowl’s seamless integration with QuickBooks. "TETON has been growing leaps and bounds," says Holmes. "So thank goodness – I wouldn’t have a life right now if I hadn’t implemented Fishbowl. And I have been the beneficiary of it. There are these big enterprise systems that we could potentially move to, but QuickBooks and Fishbowl and some of these other things that we’re using seem to be totally fine."